


Afterlife

by NitramHu



Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-08
Updated: 2021-02-08
Packaged: 2021-03-13 21:49:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29285562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NitramHu/pseuds/NitramHu
Summary: A man lays dying on a hospital bed.





	Afterlife

He laid on his hospital bed, knowing he would never stand up from it again. The room was completely silent, save for the steady beeping of the machine by his bedside. It took considerable effort to think through the pain that filled his body, every inch of his mind screaming at him to just let go.

He considered his past, or at least what parts he could still remember of it. Days, weeks, months, even years had been forgotten, with only a few salient moments remaining in his memory. His first love. All the ones that ended badly. His parents, now gone for decades. The people he had hurt. The people he had helped. The people who hurt him. He reached for as many as he could, mentally ticking each one off, allowing each memory to finally fade for good.

He took one last look at the woman sitting next to him, her face barely recognizable through the blurriness of his eyesight. He closed his eyes, and he was gone.

\---

Eons flashed by in an instant, the Earth quickly going silent as all traces of life disappeared and the Sun erupted into a supernova immediately after. Throughout the universe lights went out one by one, until every single corner was finally dark and quiet.

Moments later a tremendous flash of matter filled the darkness, and the world was born again. Trillions of year flew by, planets and stars swirling around one another, life coming into being in one breath and snuffed out with the next. 

The cycle repeated, again and again, completely imperceptible to the man in the hospital bed.

\---

He heard a voice call his name.

"I'm...I'm alive?"

He mentally reached for his body, his hands, his legs, his eyes, but found nothing.

The voice returned, calling his name again, assuring him that he was safe.

"Where am I?"

His last memory was of the hospital, of the woman's face, of closing his eyes one last time. He searched for something to hold onto - his breath, his heartbeat, but found only his own awareness, his own thoughts, his own memories.

The pain was gone, as was every other physical sensation. He felt weightless, formless, his vision filled with meaningless patterns of noise.

"You have been chosen."

\---

"John. Please listen to me very carefully. The life that you knew is over, and the world you inhabited is gone."

The voice was artificial, seeming to originate from inside his own head. John waited, but no more words came.

"Am I dreaming? Am I dead?"

He didn't exactly speak the words - there were no bodily structures to support speech, and yet the message seemed to find its recipient regardless.

"You aren't dreaming, John, but you did die. You've been dead for a very long time."

His mind wrestled with the words for a moment, trying to make sense of them. He felt anxiety run through his mind, the sensation somehow diminished without the racing heartbeat in his chest.

"Is this Heaven? Are you God?"

For the first time, he felt the voice hesitate, breaking into a word before pausing and going silent.

"No, John. I'm a human, just like yourself."

He stopped, the impossibility of his situation overwhelming his mind. His thoughts raced, urging him to run away, to cry, to curl into a ball and hide - yet those things seemed so incredibly far away now.

The voice returned, calm and confident.

"We followed your life, and we've decided that you deserve to carry on living, if you want to. If you'd rather not, I can erase your consciousness, and you'll be truly gone. The choice is yours."

Hundreds of questions raced through his mind, all of them superseded by a sense of terror that surrounded the thought of being erased for good. He sat there silently, wondering if the voice's offer would expire if he waited too long.

"I don't want to die!"

\---

"John Baldwin, iteration eight seven four four two. Consent was given, proceed with manufacture."

"Confirmed, John's body has been ordered. Next, we have a Valencia Perez, from iteration eight eight three six zero..."

\---

John opened his eyes, the sight of vegetation greeting him from above. All around him were familiar looking birch trees, the kind he remembered from his childhood. Birdsong filled his ears as he looked around, finally noticing the white blanket covering his naked body.

From above, a familiar voice returned.

"John, please try to stay calm. You're not in danger, just breathe slowly and try not to move too fast. Your mind will need some time to adjust to its new body, and we don't want you to get hurt."

He stared at the perfectly blue, cloudless sky above, the blinding brightness of the sun somehow completely absent. 

"My name is Sera, I'm here to help you adjust to your new circumstances. How are you feeling?"

John considered the question, mentally taking stock of his bodily sensations - he could feel the familiar rising and falling of his chest, blood coursing through his neck, his fingers curling and and stretching at his mind's command. He opened his mouth to speak, and he managed to vocalize with a rasp:

"I'm...I'm okay..."

The voice continued, soft and reassuring:

"Take it easy, most people need at least a few weeks to fully adjust to a new body. In the meantime, I'm going to handle your orientation. You can just lay there for as long as you need while I explain, okay?"

John strained his throat, trying to form words with a body that felt simultaneously familiar and deeply alien to his mind. Before he could manage to speak, Sera continued:

"We've re-created your body as it was during your fifties, to make it easier for mind to recognize the neural pathways it's used to. We've kept your brain largely in the state that it was at the time of your death, so you might feel a discrepancy between how your body feels and what your remember. That's okay."

John blinked, tiny birds flying above him in the distance.

\---

"Over the course of the past three thousand years, scientists have made tremendous advancements in medical science, such as the ability to manufacture artificial organs. They started with the simplest organs - artificial hearts, artificial kidneys, artificial livers. After thousand of years of research, they developed a working method for creating artificial brains - but each brain is unique, the result of millions of experiences and memories and variations that make up consciousness."

"No shortcut could be found to produce a human brain without having it be shaped by a lifetime's worth of experiences. So we developed an alternative - we developed a simpler, more easily simulated approximation of reality for human brains to exist in, to be shaped and molded by experience. We simply set the initial parameters of the simulation and let it play out, with a rough approximation of our physical laws that eventually produces intelligent life."

"The simulation records every human that lived inside it, scoring each one based on different criteria and recording their brain structure. When the simulation ends, a small fraction of the brains recorded are selected for manufacture. Your brain - your personality, your memories, your self - was chosen to be granted life outside of the simulation."

"From your point of view, it'll be as though you were waking up from a dream, in a different place, in a different time. All of the things you experienced during your life will still feel very real, but the world you lived in and the people you knew are gone. Consciousness, we found, continues uninterrupted from simulation to manufacture - or at least, that's how everyone describes it."

"I'm sure you have a lot of questions, and you'll be given plenty of opportunities to ask them in the coming weeks. Full integration with society takes months to achieve, but I can assure you all humans that undergo this process express satisfaction with the end result."

\---

"It's going to be okay."


End file.
